


Opia

by SwAgAmAnDeR



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: AU, Angst, Cheating, Colours, F/M, M/M, Non-Descriptive Sex, Not youtubers, Time - Freeform, Trains, time is frozen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-30
Updated: 2015-11-30
Packaged: 2018-05-04 02:30:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5317148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SwAgAmAnDeR/pseuds/SwAgAmAnDeR
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the one where time stops in a train station and dan has a girlfriend but he and phil fall in love anyways</p>
            </blockquote>





	Opia

**Author's Note:**

> surprise im back from the dead  
> also pinof7 came out today and i am yelling
> 
>  
> 
> _Opia: (n.) the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, both invasive and vulnerable_

“You know I can’t do that, Jane,”

Dan paced slowly from side-to-side in the empty, grimy train station bathroom. One of the dim lights above him was flickering at an annoying rate.

“You never do anything for me, Dan,” His - he wasn’t sure what to call her anymore. Not quite his girlfriend anymore, but not his ex, either. Definitely not a friend-with-benefits. Romantic Interest? - _romantic interest’s_ thick French accent was usually Dan’s solace on a hard day, but through the phone it was shrill and hurt his ears.

“That’s not true,” There was a spider crawling horizontally along the discoloured wall. Dan watched it idly, wondering faintly where it was going. It was crawling away from a web that was cleverly set up in the upper left corner of the room.

“Is it?” Dan could almost hear her pulling the face she always did when she was upset with him. Eyebrows raised, lips pursed and puckered, eyes squinted. It made her look like a rat.

“No, I don’t believe that it is,” Dan felt the skin between his eyebrows crease in frustration as he leant against the bathroom counter. The spider was stopped now, simply resting on the wall, still facing away from what Dan assumed to be its home.

Moments passed and there was silence on the other end of the line.

“Jane,”

The dingy light above him had stopped flickering, leaving him in semi-darkness.

“Jane, are you there?”

Dan pulled his phone away from his ear to see that the call timer was stuck at 5:32. He repeatedly tried to press the red “end call” button, but got no response.

He grumbled a curse under his breath before he angrily shoved his phone into his pocket, but not before noticing that it was already 17:47, and if he didn’t hurry he wouldn’t get home until late. He took a step towards the dark wooden exit door. No use staying in the bathroom if his phone was busted - although he did enjoy the privacy. Maybe there’d be a payphone somewhere in the terminal and -

All of the air left his lungs once he shoved open the heavy door.

All around him were hundreds of people - stopped. Stopped mid-stride, stopped mid-blink, stopped with their mouth open, stopped with a phone to their ear.

He could see a train stopped on the tracks 20 feet from its respective platform.

The clock on the wall read 17:47.

A chill ran down his spine, leaving a trail of ice from the back of his neck to his belt line. It was as if time had stopped.

* * *

 

When he saw the man on Platform 3 ½, he nearly fell over.

He had been walking through the station, weaving between women and men and children of all statures and styles, careful not to touch any of them out of fear of what would happen if he did.

The huge clock hanging from the ceiling of the train station was still stopped at 17:47, and clocks in train stations never just _stop_ , so he deduced that time had somehow been frozen, if that was even possible.

He wasn’t sure where he was going or how to confront the current situation, but what he saw on Platform 3 ½ froze him dead in his tracks, leaving him indistinguishable from the crowds around him.

There was a man with glossy black hair that shone from the soft natural light filtering in from the skylights above, giving it a dark blue tint. He wore a bright blue t-shirt (Dan thought that he could make out a Nyan Cat, of all things, on the front of it), and he was seated on the edge of the cement platform, legs dangling over the tracks.

Normally, the sight wouldn’t have caught Dan’s eyes for more than a few seconds to admire how _well-put together_ he looked, but he was kicking his legs.

_Kicking his legs._

The man was kicking his legs like a child playing footsie and tapping his fingers on the ground beside him and he was moving.

He hurried towards the man, staying cognizant of the statues around him.

He didn’t want him to disappear.

Soon, he was standing behind him.

How he didn’t notice him yet, Dan had no idea, but he was staring lazily ahead and humming a familiar tune that Dan couldn’t quite place, seeming to not have a care in the world.

“Hello?” Dan spoke softly.

The man jumped, yelping loudly as he nearly fell forward onto the train tracks below. He stood up quickly once he regained his balance, and spun around to face Dan. His grey eyes shone with a blend of fear and recklessness, so Dan took a step back to be safe.

“Oh,” the man calmed down as his cool eyes swept over Dan’s figure, “wow. I thought I was the only one. Sorry,”

“Yeah,” Dan laughed nervously, “Me too,”

There was a thick awkward silence between them as they examined one another. He looked to be about the same age as Dan, and he couldn’t be more than an inch or two shorter than him. He had pale skin and a black fringe that was identical to his own, only flipped. Dan’s earlier observation was right: it _was_ a Nyan Cat on his shirt. He looked nice in blue.

“So...Are you seeing all of this too?” The pale man gestured around him.

“If you mean the mass of people that are mysteriously frozen in place,” Dan gave a weak smile, “Then yes,”

“Good. At least I’m not _entirely_ crazy. Unless you’re just a figment of my imagination,” He dramatically squinted at the brunette with fake scrutiny.

“Oh no,” Dan smiled and rolled his eyes, “You’ve got me. I’m an imaginary creature, straight from the brain of…”

“Phil,” the apparent Phil smiled at him, causing Dan’s stomach to tighten in the most confusing way.

“My name’s Dan,” he pushed the uncomfortable feeling away and gave his signature smirk, the one he used at cheap bars and sketchy family reunions, “Pleasure to meet you,”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if you _were_ just a figment of my imagination, because I’ve never seen someone so good-looking before,”

His lungs seized up in surprise, and for a few seconds he thought that whatever had happened to the people around them was happening to him, but then effervescent bubbles of laughter sputtered up from the bottom of his chest, and he laughed and laughed and laughed until he had doubled over and there were tears leaking from the corner of his eyes.

He eventually stabilized himself enough to look up.

Phil was obviously hurt, looking a bit like a kicked puppy. Dan noted this. Normally when he acted like an asswipe around Jane, he just got stared down by her rat-face. “What?”

“It’s just that,” he used his thumb to wipe away his tears, still grinning wildly, “we’re here, in the middle of a- a frozen train station. Either one or both of us are batshit crazy, or some higher power has randomly decided to throw Judgement Day upon us or something, and you’re...you’re _flirting_ with me,”

Phil laughed nervously and his right hand reached over to grip his left wrist.

“Speaking of,” Dan sensed the awkwardness and redirected the conversation, “What do we, er, do?”

“I...don’t know,” he looked around, “I’ve been walking around for...does time even exist anymore? It felt like a long time, but who knows. I eventually decided to just sit here for a while,”

“I don’t suppose there’s much to do other than that,” Dan scratched the back of his neck, “You think it’s like this everywhere?”

“I’d think so,” Phil swept his eyes over the seemingly endless crowd of people, “Where were you when it happened? I was ordering at the cafe, and I gave my order to the cashier and they just kind of stared at me,”

Dan laughed, “I was in the bathroom. I was talking to my, uh, friend, when the line went dead. Then I walked outside and saw this. My phone still isn’t working,”

“Yeah, neither is mine,” He pulled his smartphone out of his pocket and showed Dan his frozen Twitter feed, “Guess everything’s frozen,”

“Yeah,” he gave a small smile, “Except for us,”

“Except for us,”

There was silence, eerie silence, awkward silence.

Dan couldn’t take it.

“So, Phil, where do you live?”

* * *

 

As it turned out, Phil was a pretty cool guy.

25 years old. Just graduated from uni with a Masters’ in Video Postproduction. He lived in London but was going to visit his parents in Manchester. He had a brother who was a bank teller and a sister who was getting ready to graduate from secondary school. His favorite animal was a lion, and he had a _thing_ about colours.

“I think it’s one of the coolest things about the human experience. Most other species either don’t see colour at all or use it for survival purposes, but we humans are privileged enough to see all of this,” he gestured around him, “for purely aesthetical value. It’s brilliant,”

“Wow Phil, _never_ could have guessed you were an art student,” Dan smiled and rolled his eyes.

He laughed, the somber echo of it reminding Dan how alone they were, “I get that a lot. Even my art professor thought I was crazy. I did a really extensive study on colour once for my final exam in my graphic design course, and as a matter of fact…” Phil’s eyes suddenly switched from some indistinct focal point in the distance to staring directly into Dan’s eyes, “I think your eyes are taupe,”

“Taupe?”

“Taupe. It’s a shade of brown. Very pretty,”

“You’re just making stuff up to impress me,” Dan laughed.

“Trying to impress you? Yes. Making stuff up? No,” Phil was looking into Dan’s eyes again. He really wished that he’d stop doing that. It made his heart pound furiously

“Well, what colour are _your_ eyes, then?”

“Pewter, last time I checked,”

“Your shirt?”

“Palatinate blue,”

“That’s not a real colour,”

“It is,”

“Ok, _my_ shirt?”

“Black,”

“Just black?”

“Black is black,” Phil shrugged, “Well, it’s actually the _absence_ of colour, if you want to be technical,”

_How pretentious,_ Dan wanted to say.

Instead he smiled and said, “That’s pretty cool,”

“Thanks,” Dan could’ve sworn he saw a blush on Phil’s cheeks, “Tell me what your ‘thing’ is,”

Dan was confused.

“I have a ‘thing’ about colours. How about you?”

Dan sifted through the contents of his mind for a moment. He wasn’t sure that he had a thing. He was 21, and worked a crap job as the night shift clerk at his local Tesco. He had planned to take a “gap year”, a small break between secondary school and uni, but his perpetual laziness and chronic existential crises had turned it into a “gap 2 ½ years”. His favourite colour was black, his favourite hobby was staring at the bleak bedroom walls of his and Jane’s flat, and his little blue happy pill was the only thing that got him out of bed in the morning.

“I...don’t think that I have one,”

“Oh, come on, sure you do. Everyone has _something_ they’re intrigued by,” Phil looked at him expectantly.

“Honestly, Phil, I don’t think that I do,” Dan reached his right arm over to grab his left.

“If you say so,” he leaned back onto the palms of his hands, “What about when you were younger? I refuse to believe that for all of the 21 years of your life, you’ve never found something fascinating,”

“Well,” Dan thought for a moment, “I used to be really obsessed with time,”

“Time?” Phil raised an eyebrow, allowing more light to reflect off of his _‘pewter’_ eyes, “Go on,”

“Time is just…” Dan twisted his hand around in the air, trying to catch the words, “so _final_. Every second that passes, we’re never able to get back. It goes by so quickly, too, it seems like not too long ago I was just starting secondary school, not a care in the world. Kind of makes you think, you know, what’s the point? In perspective, we’re just going to exist for a tiny fraction of time. It baffles me how people can go on with their lives all happy and stuff when they know that they’re not going to ‘change the world’, not really,” he glanced over at Phil. He was studying him, his narrow eyes sliding up and down Dan’s body, “Sorry. That was kind of dark,”

“You’re fine,” he shook his head, “Why’d you ever stop?”

“Hm?”

“Why aren’t you fascinated with time anymore?”

“For that exact reason,”

Phil met his eyes, and behind them he saw a new emotion, one that he couldn’t quite place.

“You know, Dan, I think that I _really_ want to stay in touch with you once this is all said and done,”

* * *

 

They eventually made their way to a ticket station, weaving through the crowds hand-in-hand so as to not “lose each other”.

Dan had smiled at that.

“So,” Phil said, rustling through the drawers behind the counter. There was a woman standing a few inches to his right in a deep blue blazer with dirty blonde hair pinned into an immaculate bun on the top of her head. Her shiny, hot pink lips were formed into a comfortable-looking smile and her arm was stretched out over the counter, two tickets in between her fingers, “I have a question for you, Dan,”

He turned his eyes back to Phil. He was hunched over the drawer and had half of the contents scattered across the countertop. He could just barely see his mouth, “Shoot,”

Someone dropped a five kilogram weight in Dan’s gut as he stuttered, “I, uh...yeah, I am,” Jane’s rat-face edged its way into his mind, “Why do you ask,”

“Just curious,” Dan thought he saw a small smile appear on his face, but he couldn’t be sure from this angle, “Aha!” his head shot up, “Found pen and paper!”

A smile creeped onto Dan’s face.

Using the counter in front of him, Phil scrawled out ten numbers onto the small slip of paper - it looked like it was a business card - and then reached over to hand it to Dan.

The brunette looked down. It was blank, “Haha, very funny, Phil,”

“What do you mean?” He looked slightly hurt and confused. Must be a good actor.

“If you didn’t want to give me your number, you could have just said so,”

“But I _gave_ you my number,”

“No, you didn’t,” Dan held up the blank card for the other to see.

Phil looked utterly confused, “But...I...Let me see it?”

Dan handed him the card and he looked at it for a second before putting it down on the counter and trying again. Dan watched him this time, watched the pen paint ten black digits onto the white paper.

He picked it up. It was blank.

Phil was stunned.

“Honestly,” Dan glanced at the blonde woman beside them, “Considering everything else that’s going on, I’m not surprised,”

Phil shook his head, “You...you try,”

Dan tried. It didn’t work.

“Maybe if we wrote it on _ourselves_ , then it would work?” Phil suggested.

It didn’t. The ink disappeared from their skin just as soon as it was drawn on.

“This is...this is weird,” Phil’s eyes were wide, darting from Dan’s face, to the pen, to Dan’s face. He wasn’t sure why, in a crowded train station where bloody time had stopped, _this_ was what was getting to him.

“Hey, it’s alright…” Dan smiled at him weakly, “What’s your name? Er, last name, I mean?”

“Phil…” his eyebrows furrowed, “ _Phil_ …” He met Dan’s eyes, “I can’t say it,”

“I know it, I _know_ it, it’s… I physically cannot get myself to say it,” He looked overwhelmed.

“Let me try,” Dan took a deep breath, “Dan…” Howell, “Dan…” _Howell,_ “ _Dan…”_ _Howell,_ “Wow, that’s infuriating,”

“Just a little…”

They met each other’s eyes for a few moments before both turning and heading back to their platform.

* * *

 

“Maybe this is Hell,” Phil gazed somewhere in the distance. They were sitting on the edge of Platform 3 ½, legs dangling off, hands intertwined. How they started holding hands, Dan wasn’t really sure, but he didn’t care, “or purgatory or something,”

“Do you believe in that stuff?” It wouldn’t surprise Dan if he did - Phil was indescribably _alive_. He saw a light in each person, an adventure around every corner. He was the type of person to cry at sunsets and could differentiate between palatinate blue and periwinkle. He was art.

“Yeah. Do you?”

“Not really,”

Phil shrugged, “That’s alright,”

There was silence and Phil’s cold thumb rubbing against the back of his hand.

“What _do_ you believe in, then?”

Dan pondered that. What _did_ he believe in? “I don’t know. Taking time to relax. Giving just as much as you receive. That there will always be someone, somewhere who loves you,”

And then, by some stroke of magic, they were one. Dan was Phil and Phil was Dan as they moved in sync, meeting each other’s eyes before leaning in and meeting each other’s lips.

It was slow and easy and soft at first.

Dan felt like Phil was everywhere.

In the air, in his head, crawling up his skin, running his fingers through his hair, his hands on his back, his tongue in his mouth.

Phil, Phil, _Phil._

Tender and sweet. There were butterflies soaring in his stomach that hadn’t flown in years.

And then Phil went further, down his neck, throwing off his shirt, going down, down, down.

Phil, Phil, Phil.

But Jane.

Jane, who he promised he’d never betray, who he once loved with all his heart.

Phil.

Jane.

Hickeys on his neck.

Phil.

Jane.

A hand groping his bulge.

Phil.

Jane.

Throwing his pants off.

Phil.

Jane.

A mouth around his cock.

Phil.

Phil.

_Phil._

“Jane!”

And then the record scratched, the ball dropped, the rain began to pour. No matter how you say it, the moment was over.

Phil knew what the situation was. He wasn’t dumb.

Dan’s throat was blocked by anxiety. He wanted to explain-

Explain _what_? There was no way to fix this.

There were tears welling up in Phil’s eyes as he hastily pulled up his pants with shaky hands.

“Phil…” Dan began to cover himself up as well.

“I don’t want to hear about it, Dan,” He began to walk away.

“I-”

“It’s fine, Dan. I should know better than to hook-up with strangers anyways,”

Phil left, and Dan quickly followed, pushing past the people in the crowd, no longer caring what balance he was interrupting.

“Phil, please,” he called out after five minutes of their slow-paced chase.

Surprisingly, Phil actually turned around, causing Dan to bump right into him.

“I’m sorry, Phil, I-”

“You know, Dan,” Phil said with a vacant look in his eyes, discarding his apologies, “I think I was right. This _is_ Hell. Did you know that every single one of my past relationships ended because someone _cheated_ on me?” he laughed sickly, tears pooling in his eyes nonetheless, “Can you believe that? Every single one of them. And now, I’m stuck in this train station, and I find someone who I truly connect with. I thought that this was some miracle of Fate. But then, the exact. Same. Thing happens,”

Phil isn’t crying, but damn does he look like he’ll start. His eyes are red and and glistening and his lip is trembling.

A wave of guilt rushes over Dan. It starts at his toes, burning him like fire but then freezing him just as quick as it works its way up, up, up.

It catches in his throat and he’s sure that his head will explode from the pressure.

But instead, a single tear rolls down his cheek, and the world is awoken from its terrible slumber.

* * *

 

Dan stared into the pewter eyes before him.

Phil was looking at him, really, truly looking at _him_ , past the façade of under-the-eye bags and black-on-black outfits that he put up each day.

Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, Dan wasn’t quite sure.

The shouts and hums of the train station around them hammered on Dan’s eardrums, and the people passing blurred into rushed streaks of colour, yet somehow it felt to Dan as if he and Phil were on that platform again, time stopped, just the two of them.

He couldn’t bear the intensity any longer, so he drew his eyes to some place less menacing: Phil’s pink lips.

His mouth twitched.

“I’ve got to go,” Phil blinked rapidly and gently reached a hand up to Dan’s shoulder, “I can’t miss my train,”

Dan blinked and his eyes flickered up to meet Phil’s before he could stop them. They looked distant now, “I figured you say that,”

The men stood in silence for a few moments, enjoying the bittersweet sight of one another one last time before Fate took ahold of their leashes again and dragged them away from each other.

“Goodbye, Phil,” Dan’s phone buzzed in his pocket.

“Goodbye, Dan,” Phil said with a curt nod.

He hesitated for a second before turning around and pushing his way through the hurried swarm of people.

Dan watched Phil’s black fringe bob farther and farther until eventually it was out of sight.

He imagined for a moment that this was not their final goodbye - that in a few moments Dan’s phone would buzz with a text from the older man, that he would empty his pockets later to find a small slip of paper with ten numbers and the name “Phil :)” written on it, that in a week or so he would get a Facebook request from someone called Phil with a profile picture of a lion.

He shook those thoughts out of his head as quickly as he could.

He turned on his heel and began to make his way back to the bathroom.

He needed to call Jane back.

 

**Author's Note:**

> wow im sorry  
> dont kill me  
> fun fact i wrote the ending to this first and then backtracked my way into this shitstorm of a fic  
> i hope that people actually read this bc i was gonna show this to my mom but then i wrote that ~*oh so scandalous sex scene*~ and now i need to get attention from other outlets  
> also im writing fanfiction of this fanfiction where d&p actually get together bc my heart hurts  
> but im finishing my modernwitch!au first  
> thanks for reading!! constructive criticism is always appreciated!!


End file.
